Marine-Based Photocatalyst for Sustainable Building Façades
摘要
Building façades are essential to urban aesthetics and functionality, yet they face persistent degradation from weathering, biological colonization, and particulate deposition. Beyond their architectural role, façades play a key role in hygrothermal regulation and indoor comfort. Addressing these challenges, photocatalysis offers a promising solution, leveraging light-driven redox reactions to degrade pollutants while imparting surfaces with self-cleaning, biocidal, and air-purifying capabilities. These processes often induce superhydrophilicity, enhancing resistance to fouling. However, conventional photocatalytic systems often rely on costly, non-renewable materials. This study proposes a sustainable alternative: a marine-derived photocatalyst based on calcined oyster shells (biogenic lime), functionalized with titanium dioxide (anatase TiO₂) and silver (Ag) via incipient wetness impregnation, followed by calcination (at 450 °C with a 2-h ramp-up and a 2-h hold), benchmarked against pure TiO₂ as a reference. The marine-based material was applied to lime mortar coated with silicate paint and characterized via SEM-EDS. The photocatalytic performance was assessed through rhodamine B degradation under UV light and water interaction tests, including contact angle measurements and microdrop absorption time. The marine-based photocatalyst achieved 30–40% of the self-cleaning efficiency of commercial TiO₂ when normalized considering the color change observed for the first, despite having roughly half the photoactive atomic concentration, indicating potential for future optimization.